Meet the partners: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (UNIVE)

At the heart of GREENDIGO is a shared ambition to help transform denim dyeing into a safer and more sustainable process. Leading the project’s work on safety and sustainability assessment is Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (UNIVE), whose team brings deep expertise in environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, exposure assessment and life cycle-based sustainability evaluation. As GREENDIGO develops a new bio-based approach to indigo dyeing, UNIVE plays a central role in ensuring that the technology is not only innovative, but also safe and sustainable by design.

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The UNIVE team is led by Elena Semenzin, Associate Professor in Environmental Chemistry, who coordinates Work Package 4: SSbD Safety and Sustainability Assessment. Her expertise lies in environmental risk assessment for both traditional and emerging pollutants, including nanomaterials, across the life cycle of products and processes, as well as in environmental sustainability assessment through methods such as Life Cycle Assessment. Within GREENDIGO, she leads the implementation of the European Commission’s Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework, helping embed sustainability and safety considerations into the innovation process from the very beginning. She is joined by a multidisciplinary team that includes Marco Picone, Senior Researcher with expertise in ecology and ecotoxicology; Alessandro Bonetto, Technician specialised in exposure assessment, trace-level analysis and characterization of organic molecules and experimental design; Martina Menegaldo, Postdoctoral Researcher working on life cycle-based safety and sustainability assessment, with a particular focus on environmental aspects; and Sarah Devecchi, PhD student focusing on absolute sustainability and the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability assessment, including LCA, S-LCA and LCC. The team is expected to grow further in the coming months with additional PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

For UNIVE, GREENDIGO is an opportunity to contribute directly to the development of safer and more sustainable bio-based textile solutions by integrating advanced safety and sustainability methodologies into a highly innovative industrial context. A key expectation is that, by applying Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA) throughout the innovation process, the project can support alignment with planetary boundaries and help define a pathway toward truly sustainable denim production. This approach reflects a broader shift from measuring whether a technology is simply “better” than current practice to asking whether it can operate within the limits of what the planet can sustain.

Several specific challenges make UNIVE’s role especially important in GREENDIGO. One is the assessment of environmental and human exposure, with particular attention to wastewater characterization, since wastewater remains one of the major pollution pathways in the denim industry and one of the areas where GREENDIGO’s technology could deliver significant benefits. Another is the integration of Risk Assessment and Life Cycle Assessment, helping ensure that safety and sustainability are considered together rather than in isolation. A further challenge is bringing the AESA framework into the early stages of technology development, so that the project can evaluate from the outset whether the new dyeing system can meet the conditions of absolute sustainability.

This work is closely aligned with Ca’ Foscari’s broader institutional commitment to sustainability. Through the Ca’ Foscari Sostenibile programme, the university promotes sustainability as a guiding perspective across teaching, research, technology transfer, and internal processes. This commitment is reflected in the university’s Statute and reported annually through its Sustainability Report. Elena Semenzin has also served as the Rector’s Delegate for Sustainability since 2021, representing Ca’ Foscari in the Italian Network of Universities for Sustainable Development and in the UN Global Compact Network Italy Foundation, where she has served as Vice President since April 2025. For Ca’ Foscari, universities have a fundamental role in helping guide society toward a new development model and in advancing the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. GREENDIGO fits strongly within that mission.

UNIVE also brings substantial experience from previous European research projects focused on the development and application of methodologies and tools for the safety and sustainability assessment of innovative products. Among the most relevant are the recently completed SUNSHINE and GREENART projects, as well as the ongoing SUNRISE, BioSusTex, and SURFtoGREEN initiatives. In particular, UNIVE coordinates a task on absolute sustainability assessment in the BioSusTex project, where exploration of this emerging research field and its practical implications has already been underway for several years. That experience provides GREENDIGO with a strong foundation for integrating advanced sustainability thinking into a real innovation pathway.

What excites the UNIVE team most about GREENDIGO is the opportunity to work on a highly transformative solution with potentially enormous impact in a sector that is critical to the sustainability transition. The project’s focus on absolute sustainability opens the door not only to technical assessment, but also to deeper conversations with the consortium around real business cases and the scale of change required for new technologies to respect planetary boundaries. In that sense, UNIVE’s contribution is not limited to evaluating impacts; it is about helping shape a vision of innovation that is scientifically robust, industrially relevant and genuinely compatible with a more sustainable future.